In-house Service Designers — ‘we know everything and nothing’.
Having spent the last year and a half leading a small team of service designers within a large, international organisation, I’ve begun to ask myself the following question more and more; are we adequately preparing and equipping our service designers for life as in-house designers?
Over the last two months I’ve been interviewing a number of designers both in the UK and Spain, all of whom have found themselves in a position of leadership at various points in time. The aim of these virtual discussions was to understand if they too had similar concerns when it came to in-house design teams, particularly service designers, being unequipped with the additional soft skills needed for life within large organisations. The article is the first step in an ongoing series as hopefully more insights and discussion emerges from it.
Organisations as the material for service design
It’s often said that ‘Service Design is everybody’s business’, not only that of formally trained designers. To make sure this is true, we need to build partnerships with non-designers and help grow their understanding of the value of service design for both them and the business. We need to make sure the methods and processes we use are accessible to enable people to create lasting impact. However, for all of this to happen the designer is required to actively involve a variety of areas within the business, usually siloed departments with competing agendas, priorities, and values. To do that, designers need to fully understand how organisations and the people within them operate.
When operating in-house, we (designers) quite often ask ourselves and our team members questions like; does everyone in the business really have a literacy of what good products and services look like? As much as I agree that this is the right type of question we should be asking, I also wonder, why do we not ask similar questions of ourselves? If we reverse this and apply it to the designers themselves, do the designers within the business really have a literacy of how organisations operate, do they understand the culture, the policies, the governance structures that make up most large organisations?
It’s refreshing to see more and more thought leaders in the design space referring to organisations as the material for service design. The processes, systems, people, relationships, policies, governance, culture are essentially the ingredients and the services we design are made up of these ingredients. However, have you ever come across a great chef who didn’t understand and appreciate the nuanced details and differences of the ingredients they work with? I’m guessing it’s unlikely, so why should it be the same for service designers?
The soft skills of service design
It’s well known amongst the design community that service designers often have a diverse range of experiences and qualifications, many of them come from all sorts of industrial backgrounds like architecture, anthropology or fine art for example. They often find themselves experimenting within different disciplines before finding ‘a home’ within service design. Many will learn by doing while others will take extra curricular courses on the subject of service design, courses that usually focus on the specific tools and methodologies.
My own experience followed a similar path, I started out my design career in transportation design, car design in particular. However, I quickly pivoted and found myself doing further education in the shape of an MA in Multidisciplinary Design Innovation. For me, this was my first ‘lucky moment’ in terms of preparing me for in-house experiences. That specific course contained additional modules that focussed on strategy development and communication, while also touching on elements of philosophy and psychology, modules I believe would prove invaluable going forward.
My next ‘lucky break’ came straight after I graduated. I took part in what’s known as a KTP, or Knowledge Transfer Partnership. The KTP is a partly government-funded programme that enables collaboration between businesses, universities and graduates. The beauty of the KTP is it embeds a graduate in-house within an organisation where, in my case, you work on a specific design based project. Not only that, you get constant guidance and tutelage from a mentor professor from the university. I was lucky enough to have the amazing Joyce Yee guide me through my two year stint, providing me with the type of organisational related direction and advice that very few designers get to experience.
These in depth experiences provided me with a number of soft skills in terms of business acumen, people skills, social skills, communication skills, social and emotional intelligence, that I feel are vital in terms of succeeding, even surviving as a designer who finds themselves in-house.
However, when I look around at the various service design related books, training courses and conference events, I see very few examples of this type of content or tools being spoken about.
Do we need to redesign the education of Service Design?
To be truly impactful within organisations, service designers must not only be capable of managing the complexity of things like legacy processes, be able to understand the relationships between siloed departments and be adept at driving collaboration across different stakeholder groups and cultures. They also need access to the right tools and methods in order to achieve these tasks.
With all of this in mind, does Service Design need to evolve further to stay relevant in today’s complex, in-house world? If so, what does that mean for how we educate and train the Service Designers of tomorrow? Do Service Design tools need to be reworked to account for these messy organisational realities? On the other hand, maybe moving in-house is simply a ‘baptism of fire’ that designers need to go through, some things simply can’t be ‘taught’. You often must experience it to understand it. Or, perhaps it’s simply down to the hiring process, making sure we only hire designers who are clearly capable of adapting while learning on the job?
For me, the last two options present a risk. By doing nothing we potentially lose good, capable designers, designers with excellent potential who simply couldn’t make it through the initial experience and decide to leave. Or worse still, give up on design entirely. This could be due to a lack of preparation, mentorship, or simply not being provided with the right tools and skills. Another risk is the creation of what I call “design bubbles”, a designers’ safe space formed between like minded individuals (often other designers) who begin to fight against, as opposed to working with the organisation. From here a form of design arrogance can begin to fester. These potential outcomes are just two examples (there’s far too many to list) of why I feel it’s important that we address these issues rather than ignoring them.
Taking the first steps to improving life for in-house designers
There are already some excellent examples where organisations who champion design are making steps to address these issues. These industry leaders are now providing their design teams with additional training courses on subjects such as emotional and confidence training. Others are setting up paid placements, apprenticeships, or internship schemes not too dissimilar to the Knowledge Transfer Partnership. In doing so they will ensure a new generation of designers who not only have the traditional skill sets of service design, but they will have the knowledge and experience of how to operate successfully in-house, developed over time, from day one.
It’s also very refreshing to see people like Marc Fonteijn from the Service Design Show set up something he calls the “Campfire sessions”. These online group sessions are focussed on the challenges associated with running and growing in-house service design teams and projects. Perhaps this is the first, truly visible steps we need to tackle the issues I’ve set out in this post.
These steps are very encouraging to see, my only question now is what does the broader service design community need to do. For me and many of the other design leaders I spoke with, there is clearly a problem. However, it’s a problem that we seem to be avoiding. If we don’t talk about the issues we face, how are we going to solve them?
This is an ongoing study that I will be pursuing. In writing this post, I’m looking to start a wider conversation. I’m looking for a range of opinions, both those that may push back against the ideas I’ve presented and those who agree or have had similar experiences. Let’s at least start the conversation and see where it takes us?
